Texturing

Texturing is my favorite part of the creation process. In my opinion, having the right shaders and showing really good textures really helps make the next steps such as the lighting really easy.

In this scene, I want to share one tip I learned in a tutorial by Alex Roman. I use this technique a lot in my work to make objects appear more realistic, and this scene was no exception. I used VRayDirt to remark the edges of my objects.

Lighting

For the environment lighting, I used the typical VRaySky linked to the VRaySun. As you can see in the image below, the VRaySun was pretty big. This made nice soft shadows in the image, but as a result, I needed to increase the subdivisions in VRaySun to avoid the noise.

Doing this affected the rendering time, so I had to be careful with the material settings. The intensity is quite important too; I prefer to use really small sun intensity values, as this lets me have better control over the environment. For the product shelves I used V-Ray planes, and for the hanging lamps I just used V-Ray spheres with warm color.

Camera Settings

Having kept in mind that this is an interior, I set the F-number to 4 then adjusted my overall light by making the ISO 150.

At this point, I had a pretty good balance between shadows, reflections and highlights. The last step was just to adjust my exposure by changing the shutter speed. I chose 60 as a pretty accurate setting.

I also used V-Ray Frame Buffer and Exponential Color Mapping for interiors; this gave me greater control over the contrast in the environment and burning on the raw render.

V-Ray Settings

I used V-Ray Frame Buffer and Exponential Color Mapping Gamma 2.2 in my interior; this gave me greater control over the levels and curves on the raw render.

The settings were pretty basic too (see below). Because I was rendering at a high resolution, and cared specifically about having good resolution textures and good light settings, I focused mainly on the anti-aliasing.

Post-production

For post-production work, I used the render elements from V-Ray.

Personally, I prefer the RAW elements (reflection, refraction, total lighting, shadows, lighting and so on) and blending them with soft light and Screen mode in Photoshop.

I hope you found useful information in this article, and if you have seen something that you can improve or you have a better workflow process, I am always open to listening and learning from artists; in my opinion, that's the way it works best!

Related links
Head over to Diego Querol's website
Enjoy another of his images: Creative Coffee
Sandra Tarruella has been a big influence, check out their site